Claire Fontaine's List: research_methodology

• particularly useful in pointing out the weaknesses in each qualitative paradigm - Claire Fontaine on 2008-04-08

• Phenomenology is a school of thought that emphasizes a focus on people's subjective experiences and interpretations of the world. That is, the phenomenologist wants to understand how the world appears to others.
• Instead the theory needs to be grounded or rooted in observation -- hence the term.
• Grounded theory is a complex iterative process. The research begins with the raising of generative questions which help to guide the research but are not intended to be either static or confining.

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• Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.
• The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of "phenomena": appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
• , the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (
• Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us.
• Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something.
• • Ontology is the study of beings or their being — what is.
    
  • Epistemology is the study of knowledge — how we know.
    
  • Logic is the study of valid reasoning — how to reason.
    
  • Ethics is the study of right and wrong — how we should act.
    
  • Phenomenology is the study of our experience — how we experience.

  • the core fields/disciplines of philosophy:
    ontology
    epistemology
    ethics
    logic
    phenomenology

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• According to this Heidegger-Gadamer composite, interpretation is essentially circular, since we always approach the world or a text -- or the world as text -- with a particular disposition that colors our perceptions. However, we do not merely impose our own perspective, nor is interpretation merely subjective. Circularity comes as the world resists us, confronting us with elements that refuse to conform to our disposition and subsequently forcing us to reconfigure ourselves. Thus altered, we set ourselves upon the world once again, this time with transformed eyes. The process is incessant.

  • SPIRAL not circle

• The phrase "grounded theory" refers to theory that is developed inductively from a corpus of data.
• The basic idea of the grounded theory approach is to read (and re-read) a textual database (such as a corpus of field notes) and "discover" or label variables (called categories, concepts and properties) and their interrelationships.

• What most differentiates grounded   theory from much other research is that it is explicitly emergent.    It does not test a hypothesis.  It sets out to find what theory accounts   for the research situation as it is.  In this respect it is like action   research: the aim is to understand the research situation.  The aim,   as Glaser in particular states it, is to discover the theory implicit in   the data.

  • so.. it avoids the problem of relativism, whereby we lose the ability to judge anything outside of our context... because
    
    OR NOT??
• Doing grounded theory well is partly a   matter of unlearning some of what you have been taught or have acquired   through your reading.

  • counter-intuitive, a difficult endeavor
• In fact, Glaser suggests two main   criteria for judging the adequacy of the emerging theory: that it fits the   situation;  and that it works -- that it helps the people in the situation   to make sense of their experience and to manage the situation better.

  • non-ideological
• Interviews are frequently the main   source of the information you will develop your theory from.  But any   data collection methods can be used.  Focus groups are not uncommon   in other qualitative research, and are suited to grounded theory.    So is informal conversation, group feedback analysis, or any other individual   or group activity which yields data.
• Constant comparison remains your   core process.  Your aim as you read is to compare literature to the   emerging theory in the same way that you compare data to the emerging theory.    For instance you might follow the same procedure of data-collection (in   this instance reading) overlapping with note-taking, coding and memoing.

  • this strikes me as a distinctly hermenuetic process... the overlay and constant revisiting of prior conclusions

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